Kosovo - A Cautionary Tale

It looks increasingly probable that Kosovo will
gain its independence from Serbia, an outcome that
should be of serious concern to Israel and its supporters.
Ariel Sharon, to his credit, heard the alarm bells
during the American bombing of Serbia in 1999, when
he warned American Jewish leaders: "If Israel supports
the type of action that's going on in Kosovo, it
risks becoming the next victim. Brutal intervention
must not be legitimized as a way to try to impose a
solution in regional conflicts." And, it
is no coincidence, as journalist Julia
Gorin reminds us, that during the
bombing of Serbia on behalf of Moslem
Albanians in 1999 Saudi Prince
Khaled Bin Sultan, commander of the
allied Saudi troops during the first Gulf
War, called on the US to do the same
against Israel on behalf of Palestinians.
The fate of Jews and Serbs,
which has intersected in the past, is
doing so again. The jihadist effort to
expunge Jews from Palestine mirrors
the Moslem goal of incorporating Kosovo into a
“greater Moslem Albania” while expelling Christian
Serbs.

When Serbia became independent of Byzantine
rule in the 12th century, its economic, cultural,
social and religious institutions were among the most
advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a bridge
between Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing
Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian
Orthodox Church was in Kosovo where churches,
monasteries and monastic communities were established.
A form of census in 1330, the “Decani Charter,”
detailed the list of chartered villages and households,
of which only two percent were Albanian.

The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389 and
consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major parts
of the Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast
Europe into a Koran-dictated Dark Ages. While a significant
proportion of Serbian and Croatian nobility
converted to Islam to escape the harsh conditions imposed
on non-Moslems, most Serbian peasants clung
to their Christian faith. Historian G. Richard Jansen
reports: “Serbs and Jews became dhimmis subject to
the dhimma or protection offered to Christians and
Jews in newly Islamized lands in exchange for their
lives.

Similarly Bat Ye’or, in Islam and Dhimmitude:
Where Civilizations Collide writes: “For the Orthodox
Serbs… this same period [the centuries of Moslem
rule] is considered one of massacre, pillage, slavery,
deportation, and the exile of Christian populations. In
their eyes it was a regime which found its justification in the usurpation of their land and denial of their
rights....In their wars of emancipation-and, later, of
liberation—the Orthodox Serbs found that their bitterest
adversaries were their Muslim compatriots attached
to their religious privileges and their domination
over the humiliated Christians.”

In spite of forced migrations and oppression,
like their Jewish counterparts, and unlike other Balkan
nations, Serbs maintained their cultural and religious
ties to their faith and shrines in Kosovo
which, reinforcing the parallel, they
called their Jerusalem. It was the
Serbs who first mounted, in 1804 and
1813, insurgencies which spread
through the region, culminating in the
1912 Balkan War which essentially
eliminated the Ottomans from the Balkans.

Early in the twentieth century
Serbian Christians were roughly twothirds
of the population of Kosovo,
Moslem Albanians one-third. During World War I
(triggered by the assassination in Serbia of the Austrian
arch-duke) Serbs held off the Austrians for more
than a year, before they were overwhelmed. Almost
800,000 Serbs perished, a fourth of the population.
With full Serb support, the peace treaties of 1919-1920
established a state with the name "The Kingdom of
Slovenians, Croats and Serbs." The awkward name
was shortly changed to Yugoslavia with Kosovo an
integral part of Serbia. At roughly the same time, the
Balfour Declaration promised the Jews a restored
homeland in Palestine which included what became
the present day kingdom of Jordan.

From then on Kosovo’s population underwent
sharp population shifts. During World War II, when
Yugoslav Serbs refused to join a Nazi “community of
nations,” an angry Hitler ordered the destruction of
Yugoslavia. Following the Yugoslav army’s capitulation
in 1941, Serbia was divided by the Nazis between
the Italians and the Bulgarians, who encouraged
armed gangs of pro-Nazi ethnic Albanians to attack
the Serbs and to torch, destroy and desecrate ancient
churches and shrines. The Moslem Albanians, who
surprised their mentors with their barbarity and zeal for
atrocities, were rewarded when parts of Kosovo, Montenegro
and Macedonia were annexed to “Greater Albania.”

In 1943 the Nazis formed the 21st SS
"Skanderbeg" division of Moslem Albanian volunteers
to perform an “ethnic cleansing” (of Jews and Serbs)
in Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands of Serbs were sent
to a Croatian death camp and as noted by Raul Hilberg
in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) Skanderbeg played a major role in the Holocaust,
rounding up Jews who were subsequently sent to Bergen-
Belsen and various death camps. A Kosovar
Moslem, Bedri Pejani, was appointed by the Nazis to
rule occupied Kosovo. He promptly announced a plan
to create a Great Islamic State in the region with the
blessings of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el
Husseini. The Grand Mufti, who had led a jihad in Palestine,
escaped
capture by fleeing
t o G e rm a n -
occupied Europe
where, from Sarajevo
he urged the
Nazis not to flag in
their destruction of
the Jews. Needless
to say the Serbian
Christian population
dwindled under this
onslaught and the
proportion of Albanian
Moslems surged. By the end of World War II, Yugoslav
deaths totaled more than a million, roughly half of
them Serbs.

Although the province was restored
to Yugoslavia after the war, the
population balance in Kosovo did not shift
in favor of Serbia. Tito, aiming for leadership
of a wider Balkan alliance, did not
allow Serbs who fled from their homes
during the war to return. He did not enforce
border controls and many thousands
of Albanians infiltrated through the porous
borders. (Like the Moslems in areas adjacent
to Palestine in the interwar years,
they were attracted by the superior economic
conditions.) Seeking to pacify the
restive Moslems, in 1974 Tito offered the
province political, cultural, economic and
juridical “autonomy,” along with large subsidies
for agricultural and other projects,
which merely had the effect of prompting a further influx
of Moslems from across the border. For example,
a new university was established in Pristina, with faculty
from the University of Belgrade commuting by air.

All this did not pacify the restive Moslems who
as early as 1960 demanded independence for Kosovo.
There were intermittent riots which escalated and an
emergent Kosovo Liberation Army gave as its stated
goal “an ethnic greater Albania” to include portions of
Macedonia and Montenegro, parts of southern Serbia
and an “ethnically pure” (read Moslem-only) Kosovo.

In 1979 Menachem Begin, hectored by Jimmy
Carter whose predilection for the Arab cause is well
known, also offered the rioting Arabs of Judea and
Samaria “autonomy” with the same disastrous results.
As Henry Kissinger has noted, “autonomy” is a euphemism
for independence.

Initially, the media reported the situation in Kosovo fairly. For example, in July 1982 The New
York Times noted: "Serbs have been harassed by Albanians
and have packed up and left the region. The
Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to
establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian
republic and then to merge with Albania for a greater
Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the
last decade.” Five years later, in 1987, the Times was
still reporting the persecution of Serbs within Kosovo.
"Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells
poisoned, crops burned, Slavic boys knifed. Young
Albanians have been told to rape Serbian girls…. Officials
in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge
as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment
called federal Yugoslavia….Ethnic Albanians
already control almost every phase of life in the
autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police,
judiciary, civil service, schools, and factories."

Milosevic rose to power with the promise of
reversing this intolerable situation, restoring peace and
Yugoslav control in Kosovo. But now international perception
of the crisis turned against Serbia as Milosevic
abolished the “autonomy” of Kosovo in 1989. There
were arrests and house searches of Kosovar Albanians.

And then the media went into a
frenzy of accusations against the Serbs,
much as it has against Israel and with
similar distortions. The media depicted
the armed, violent and jihadist Moslem
Albanians as “unarmed civilians” despite
the fact they called themselves an army
and perpetrated assaults, bombings, murder
of civilians and targeted assassinations
of Albanians loyal to Serbia. President
Clinton outrageously referred to a
“holocaust” perpetrated by Serbia and
compared the Moslems of Kosovo to the
Jews—this, even though the Serbs had behaved
well toward the Jews during the real
Holocaust and Clinton himself was pressing
Israel’s Jews to accept the “peace partnership”
of Arafat, a brutal terrorist far worse than Milosevic,
admittedly a dictator and a Communist thug.

The right was as vehement as the left in demanding
action. In September 1998 such luminaries of the right
as John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol and
Paul Wolfowitz joined such far leftists as Morton
Halperin in a petition to President Clinton demanding
that he not only stop “the carnage in Kosovo” but use
“massive Western pressure” to obtain “a new political
status for Kosovo.”

In March of 1999, the United States drew up a
document, the “Rambouillet Agreement” which was, as
Madeleine Albright boasted later, an absolute ultimatum
to Serbia. It was a demand for Serbia to withdraw
from Kosovo in favor of a NATO occupying force,
something that no sovereign nation could or should
accept. Incredibly, as The New York Times of April 8, 1999 reported, Milosevic accepted the entire package
with the exception of NATO occupation of Yugoslavia
itself. He wanted the troops to be under UN command.
Dan Goure, then Deputy Director of the Center for Security
and International Studies and a Pentagon official
under the first President Bush said, "Rambouillet was
not a negotiation, it was a setup, a lynch party." All
this was in direct contravention of previously stated
U.S. policy which declared that no national minority
had the right to form a new state on other state territories…
a policy which still guides the U.S. government
in respect to recognizing Taiwan’s independence.

An interesting provision of the so-called
“negotiations” demanded that the Serb army and police
forces withdraw and a new Kosovar police force
be formed to include members of the Kosovo Liberation
Party, which was supposed to disarm. Sound familiar?
What happened subsequently is better known.

In 1999 in concert with NATO, the Clinton
administration commenced a 78 day bombing
of Serbia. This action met with almost no
objection in the West, hailed not only by liberal
politicians and the media but by Margaret
Thatcher, The Wall Street Journal and
assorted conservative pundits and politicians.

To sum up: the demand for Kosovo's
independence led to KLA terrorism which led
to repression and expulsion of Albanians by
Serbian military and police, which led to the
assault by the United States and NATO.

While the brutality of the Milosevic regime
was indeed a complicating factor, he is long
gone, but the KLA continues its assault on
Serbs, on their churches, priests, homes, even
on civilians sitting in cafes, this under the nose
of the U.S. and UN troops which have now
occupied Kosovo for eight years. Never mind
that the State Department in 1998 listed the
KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating (as
Interpol’s assistant director for Criminal Intelligence
Ralph Mutschke reminded Congress in December
2000) “that it was financing its operations with money
from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic
countries and individuals, among them allegedly
Osama bin Laden.”

Media and politicians alike, vastly indignant over
Milosevic’s behavior, turn a blind eye. Speaking of
Kosovo’s major city Pristina, where 40,000 Serbs lived
before the UN took over (and where only 100 live now)
Senator Joseph Biden, presidential aspirant and
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
declared proudly that Kosovo was a “victory for Moslem
democracy” and “Pristina is one of the rare Moslem
cities in the world where the U.S. is not only respected
but adored.” (Indeed there is a street named
for Madeleine Albright, who played an especially
scurvy role in ramping up pressure against the Serbs).
Similarly the media takes notice of Kosovo only to berate
the Serbs for failing to acquiesce speedily and
gracefully to the loss of their “Jerusalem.”

Western leaders are blind to the danger to
themselves in the principle they are establishing,
namely that recent illegal immigrants from another
state have the right to declare independence over territory
long recognized as part of a different sovereign
state whose inhabitants they have ruthlessly forced to
flee.

The United States, the EU and the vast majority
of UN member states, now pushing strongly to establish
Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, are also
establishing a terrible precedent in flouting the very
international law under which the UN’s occupation of
Kosovo rests. UN Security Council Resolution 1244,
drafted to end the NATO bombing, specifically reaffirmed
that Kosovo belongs to Serbia. Detaching
Kosovo from Serbia against Serbia’s
will is to violate the UN Charter. Serbian
President Vojislav Kostunica reports that
“when we mention the need for legality,
some of these officials [UN, EU, U.S.] become
exasperated, even agitated. They respond
with various comments to the effect
that we should not be bound by ’mere’ legality.”
(The UN’s ambassador to the
“negotiations” with President Kostunica is
former Finnish president Martii Ahtisaari, a
close associate of George Soros and the
openly pro-Albanian Soros-funded International
Crisis Group.)

Finally, there is an additional peril for
the West here. The “two state solution” which
aims to strip Israel of its ancient Jewish heartland,
and the demand for Serbia to surrender
Kosovo, the locus of its Serbian Orthodox
faith, both advance the cause of resurgent Islam
and worldwide jihad. To quote Bat Ye’or
again: “In 1991, before the conflict erupted, the
English edition of [Moslem Bosnian President] Alija
Izetbegovic's Islamic Declaration (1970) specifically
stated: ‘There can be neither peace nor coexistence
between Arabia, the cradle of Islam and non-Islamic
social and political institutions.’" And he concluded:

“The Islamic movement must, and can, take over
power as soon as it is morally and numerically so
strong that it can not only destroy the existing non-
Islamic power, but also build up a new Islamic one.”

In Congressional testimony, our intelligence
agencies have now disclosed that there are 16 terror
training camps and arms depots in Kosovo. Julia Gorin
warns: “Even conservatives, who support the war on
terror and the war in Iraq, have a blind spot and an
apathy when it comes to the Balkans, as well as to the
fact that a lot of the terrorist attacks in Europe and
elsewhere are connected to the Balkans.” Gorin notes
wryly that when America needs to burnish its credentials among Moslems, it gloats about intervention on
behalf of Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo – and, of
course, demands a solution to the “Palestine” problem.

While Israel is not threatened with bombing by US/
NATO forces, economic sanctions and threats will be
enough to squeeze Israel into surrender.

Statesmen, commentators and pundits who
urge solutions and negotiations both in Serbia and
"Palestine" brush all historical claims off the table.

They simply ignore the geographical facts of the Palestine
Mandate where the Hashemites obtained over
82% of the land assigned as the Jewish National
Home. They ignore the ancient and religious ties of the Jewish people to Palestine. They ignore the migrations
of Arabs to Jewish towns in what Mark Twain
called "The Wasteland". They ignore the strategic danger
of a jihadist state in Palestine. With respect to
Serbia, the “solution groupies” show the same disregard
for historical and religious ties and sovereignty;
the same indifference to the enforced migrations and
immigrations which created an ethnic Albanian majority
in Kosovo; and the same blindness to the dangers
of a jihadist “greater Albania” anxious to incorporate
Kosovo into a Balkan caliphate.

And so Kosovo may become independent.

Welcome to a new Moslem jihadist state, which will no
doubt eagerly await the exchange of ambassadors
with a jihadist Moslem state in Judea and Samaria.

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About Us

The American Council for Kosovo is an independent U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a better American understanding of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and of the critical American stake in the province's future.

The Council's mission is to make accurate information and analysis about Kosovo available to officials of the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. Government; to think tanks, media, NGOs, religious and advocacy organizations; and to the general public.